Abounding in Kindness

Theologian Elizabeth Johnson summarizes the prophetic path as following a merciful God who abounds in kindness: 

Abounding in kindness, the holy mystery of God is love beyond imagining. Not enough people seem to know this, even those who practice the Christian religion. But the drumbeat of this good news resounds throughout the history of ancient Israel where, from the start of their liberation from slavery, people encountered “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6). The drumbeat becomes unmistakably intense in Jesus Christ who preached and enacted divine compassion in startling ways, all the way to the cross and beyond. Its volume ramps up in the church wherever this word is heard and practiced amid the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of people of this age.

This is not a word that returns to its Maker empty. Working creatively for peace amid horrific violence; struggling for justice in the face of massive poverty and military oppression; advocating ecological wholeness for the earth’s life-giving systems and stressed-out species; educating the young and the old; healing the sick and comforting those in despair; creating beauty; taking joy in nourishing children; promoting freedom for captives: the list could go on because the needs are enormous. Even a simple cup of cold water given in Christ’s name symbolizes how the abounding kindness of God becomes effective in this world. [1]

For Johnson, God’s compassion and solidarity for those who are suffering requires us to show the same: 

If the heart of divine mystery is turned in compassion toward the world, then devotion to this God draws persons into the shape of divine communion with all others: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). To deny one’s connection with the suffering needs of others is to detach oneself from divine communion.

The praxis of mercy is propelled by this dynamic. So too is committed work on behalf of peace, human rights, economic justice, and the transformation of social structures. For those who engage in this work out of deep contemplative experience, it is far from mere activism or simple good deeds. Rather, solidarity with those who suffer, being there with commitment to their flourishing, is the locus of encounter with the living God. Through what is basically a prophetic stance, one shares in the passion of God for the world.…

The preferential option for the poor must now include the vulnerable, voiceless, nonhuman species and the ravaged natural world itself, all of which are kin to humankind. Loving these neighbors as their very selves, committed religious persons develop moral principles, political structures, and lifestyles that promote other creatures’ thriving and halt their exploitation. For the prophetic passion flowing from contemplative insight, action on behalf of justice for the earth participates in the compassionate care of the Creator God who wills the glorious well-being of the whole interdependent community of life. [2]

The Prophetic Path of Scripture

For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; … Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents.
—Malachi 3:2, 4:5–6, NRSV 

Father Richard writes of the prophetic path shown in the Scriptures:  

These words from the prophet Malachi describe the one who will be the fitting precursor for any coming Messiah. Christians have usually applied this passage to John the Baptist, as Jesus himself and the gospel writers already have done. But this text has even more significance. In very few verses, it succeeds in charting the sequencing of the prophetic Word of God. When the Scriptures are used maturely, they proceed in this order: 

1. They confront us with a bigger picture than we are used to: “God’s reign” that has the potential to “deconstruct” our false world views.  

2. They then have the power to convert us to an alternative worldview by proclamation, grace, and the sheer attraction of the good, the true, and the beautiful (not by lower-level motivations of shame, guilt, or fear).  

3. They then console us and bring deep healing as they “reconstruct” us in a new place with a new mind and heart.  

The prophet Malachi does this. He describes the work of the God Messenger as both “great and terrible,” both wonderful and threatening at the same time. It is not that the Word of God is threatening us with fire and brimstone. Rather, the Scripture is saying that goodness is its own reward and evil is its own punishment. If we do the truth and live connected in the world as it really is, we will be blessed and grace can flow. The consolation will follow from the confrontation with the Big Picture. If we create a false world of separateness and egocentricity, it will not work and we will suffer the consequences even now. In short, we are not punished for our sins, but by our sins! [1]

The Eternal Word of God that we read about in the prologue to John’s Gospel “leapt down,” as it says in the Book of Wisdom (18:14–15). It took its abiding place on Earth in order to heal every bit of separation and splitness that we experience. That splitness and separation is the sadness of the human race. When we feel separate, when we feel disconnected, when we feel split from our self, from our family, from reality, from the Earth, from God, we become angry and depressed people. Deep down, we know we weren’t created for separateness; we were created for the Big Picture and for union.

God sent Jesus into the world as the One who would personify that union—who would put human and divine, matter and spirit together. That’s what we spend our whole life trying to believe: that this ordinary earthly sojourn means something. [2]

The Prophetic Holy Family

Father Richard praises the courageous and prophetic faith of Mary and Joseph:

Kingdom of God people are history makers. They break through the small kingdoms of this world to an alternative and much larger world, God’s full creation. People who are still living in the false self are history stoppers. They use God and religion to protect their own status and the status quo of the world that sustains them. They are often fearful people, the nice proper folks of every age who think like everyone else thinks and who have no power to break through, or as Jesus’ opening words put it, “to change” (Mark 1:15; Matthew 4:17).

How can we really think that Mary—if she thought like any good Jewish girl of her time was trained to think—could possibly be fully ready to hear, to speak, or to live out God’s message? She had to let God lead her outside of her box of expectations, her comfort zone, her dutiful religion of follow-the-leader (a feature of all religions at their lower levels). She was very young and largely uneducated. Perhaps theology itself is not the necessary path but instead simply integrity and courage. Nothing anyone said at the synagogue would have prepared Mary or Joseph for this situation. They both had to rely on their angels! What proper bishop would trust such a situation? I wouldn’t myself. All we know of Joseph is that he was “a just man” (Matthew 1:19), probably also young and uneducated. The circumstance is a total afront to our criteria and way of evaluating authenticity.

So why do we love and admire people like Mary and Joseph, and then not imitate their faith journeys, their prophetic courage, their non-reassurance by the religious system?

Like the prophets we have met this year, Mary and Joseph trusted their encounter with God and acted accordingly: 

These were two laypeople who totally trusted their inner experience of God and followed it to Bethlehem and beyond. There is no mention in the Gospels of the two checking out their inner experiences with the high priests, the synagogue, or even their Jewish Scriptures. Mary and Joseph walked in courage and absolute faith that their experience was true, with no one except God to reassure them they were right. Their only safety net was God’s love and mercy, a safety net they must have tried out many times, or else they never would have been able to fall into it so gracefully.

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Quote from John Chaffee’s Friday Five….

“Religion is for people looking to avoid hell, spirituality is for people who have already gone through it.“

– Fr. Richard Rohr, OSF

Wow.  That’s a good one, isn’t it?

It feels as though there are seasons of life to these things.  For a time (and perhaps it is a long time) some of us are very committed to “religion” and to being “religious” thinking that it can protect us from some particular suffering…

Then, suffering happens anyway and we are left asking, “What happened?  I was doing all the right things?”

If we are graced with the opportunity, we can then dive into spirituality when our religion falls apart.

Now, it is not that spirituality does not have a religion or utilize religious forms, ceremonies, or practices.  Spirituality uses them but does so from a different stance or posture.  The difference is that religion is no longer an end in and of itself, religion becomes the servant of spirituality.

“Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” —Matthew 25:40

In Matthew 25, Jesus identifies himself as incarnate always through people in need. Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day (1897–1980) expands on this gospel message:

It is no use saying that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ. Nor will those who live at the end of the world have been born too late. Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts.

But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that He speaks, with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers, and children that he gazes; with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers, and suburban housewives that He gives. It is with the feet of soldiers and tramps that He walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that He longs for shelter. And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ….

It would be foolish to pretend that it is always easy to remember this. If everyone were holy and handsome, with “alter Christus” [“another Christ”] shining in neon lighting from them, it would be easy to see Christ in everyone. If Mary had appeared in Bethlehem clothed, as St. John says, with the sun, a crown of twelve stars on her head, and the moon under her feet [see Revelation 12:1], then people would have fought to make room for her. But that was not God’s way for her, nor is it Christ’s way for Himself.

Day offers examples of those who ministered to the Christ child and how we can too:

In Christ’s human life, there were always a few who made up for the neglect of the crowd. The shepherds did it; their hurrying to the crib atoned for the people who would flee from Christ. The wise men did it; their journey across the world made up for those who refused to stir one hand’s breadth from the routine of their lives to go to Christ. Even the gifts the wise men brought have in themselves an obscure recompense and atonement for what would follow later in this Child’s life. For they brought gold, the king’s emblem, to make up for the crown of thorns that He would wear; they offered incense, the symbol of praise, to make up for the mockery and the spitting; they gave Him myrrh, to heal and soothe, and He was wounded from head to foot….

We can do it too, exactly as they did. We are not born too late. We do it by seeing Christ and serving Christ in friends and strangers, in everyone we come in contact with…. For a total Christian, the goad of duty is not needed … to perform this or that good deed. It is not a duty to help Christ, it is a privilege.

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Sarah Young

Let My Presence override everything you experience. Like a luminous veil of Light, I hover over you and everything around you. I am training you to stay conscious of Me in each situation you encounter.
     When the patriarch Jacob ran away from his enraged brother, he went to sleep on a stone pillow in a land that seemed desolate. But after dreaming about heaven and angels and promises of My Presence, he awoke and exclaimed, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” His discovery was not only for him but for all who seek Me. Whenever you feel distant from Me, say, “Surely the Lord is in this place!” Then, ask Me to give you awareness of My Presence. This is a prayer that I delight to answer.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

Psalm 31:20 (NLT)
20 You hide them in the shelter of your presence,
    safe from those who conspire against them.
You shelter them in your presence,
    far from accusing tongues.

Genesis 28:11-16 (NLT)
11 At sundown he arrived at a good place to set up camp and stopped there for the night. Jacob found a stone to rest his head against and lay down to sleep. 12 As he slept, he dreamed of a stairway that reached from the earth up to heaven. And he saw the angels of God going up and down the stairway.
13 At the top of the stairway stood the Lord, and he said, “I am the Lord, the God of your grandfather Abraham, and the God of your father, Isaac. The ground you are lying on belongs to you. I am giving it to you and your descendants. 14 Your descendants will be as numerous as the dust of the earth! They will spread out in all directions—to the west and the east, to the north and the south. And all the families of the earth will be blessed through you and your descendants. 15 What’s more, I am with you, and I will protect you wherever you go. One day I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have finished giving you everything I have promised you.”

Franciscan sister Ilia Delio focuses on the theology of the incarnation and the universal nature of the Christ mystery:

The Christian message is that God has become flesh [sarx in Greek or “matter”]—not a part of God or one aspect of God but the whole infinite, eternal God Creator has become matter. The claim—God has become flesh—is so radical that it is virtually unthinkable and illogical. Christianity is the most radical of all world religions because it takes matter seriously as the home of divinity. [1]

So does everyone have to become Christian to know the Christ? Absolutely not. Christ is more than Jesus. Christ is the communion of divine personal love expressed in every created form of reality—every star, leaf, bird, fish, tree, rabbit, and human person. Everything is christified because everything expresses divine love incarnate. However, Jesus Christ is the “thisness” of God, so what Jesus is by nature everything else is by grace (divine love). We are not God, but every single person is born out of the love of God, expresses this love in [their] unique personal form, and has the capacity to be united with God…. Because Jesus is the Christ, every human is already reconciled with every other human in the mystery of the divine, so that Christ is more than Jesus alone. Christ is the whole reality bound in a union of love.

We cannot know this mystery of Christ as a doctrine or an idea; it is the root reality of all existence. Hence, we must travel inward, into the interior depth of the soul where the field of divine love is expressed in the “thisness” of our own, particular life. Each of us is a little word of the Word of God, a mini-incarnation of divine love. The journey inward requires surrender to this mystery in our lives, and this means letting go of our “control buttons.” It means dying to the untethered selves that occupy us daily; it means embracing the sufferings of our lives, from the little sufferings to the big ones; it means allowing God’s grace to heal us, hold us, and empower us for life; it means entering into darkness, the unknowns of our lives, and learning to trust the darkness, for the tenderness of divine love is already there; it means being willing to surrender all that we have for all that we can become in God’s love; and finally, it means to let God’s love heal us of the opposing tensions within us. When we can say with full voice, “You are the God of my heart, my God and my portion forever” [Psalm 73:26], then we can open our eyes to see that the God I seek is already in me … and in you. We are already One. [2]

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December 12 2014

Journal Entry for Today-JDV

Lord, this devotional is very timely as I take stock of 2014 and look out at the future of 2015. However, there is something here that doesn’t quite ring true. If Jesus paid the price for our sins and transgressions, then why should we recall them and our yesterdays as if we need to be held accountable?  What can we be held accountable for, if Jesus paid the price? Is this one more of those “bait and switch” teachings? Jesus paid it all now it is up to me to live it out and be held to account for not doing so according to some measuring guide?

And God says…”I said I will remember your sins no more. They are as far as the east from the west. I do not recall past, present or future sins. When I look at the accounting, I see Jesus, and how you allowed My Spirit to live through you. There is no measurement, only yes and no. As you have been fond of saying, “God does not grade on the curve”. So let go of the past, present and future, and look to the new year as an opportunity to step out in a vision and faith so large, that the only way to live it is to be totally surrendered to Me. Seek first the kingdom of God and everything else you require will be provided. Delight yourself in the Lord and I will give you the desires of your heart. Do not get confused by the enemy contemplating your failures and missteps. Focus on Jesus and by the strength and faith of Jesus, allow your vision, hopes and dreams to become real. Acknowledge Me in all our ways and I will make your paths straight.”

Richard Rohr describes the transformative power of an incarnational worldview:

I have concluded that there are four basic worldviews, though they might be expressed in many ways and are not necessarily separate.

Those who hold a material worldview believe that the outer, visible universe is the ultimate and “real” world. People of this worldview have given us science, engineering, medicine, and much of what we now call “civilization.” A material worldview tends to create highly consumer-oriented and competitive cultures, which are often preoccupied with scarcity, since material goods are always limited.

A spiritual worldview characterizes many forms of religion and some idealistic philosophies that recognize the primacy and finality of spirit, consciousness, the invisible world behind all manifestations. This worldview is partially good too, because it maintains the reality of the spiritual world, which many materialists deny. But the spiritual worldview, taken to extremes, has little concern for the earth, the neighbor, or justice, because it considers this world largely as an illusion.

Those holding what I call a priestly worldview are generally sophisticated, trained, and experienced people that feel their job is to help us put matter and Spirit together. The downside is that this view assumes that the two worlds are actually separate and need someone to bind them together again.

In contrast to these three is an incarnational worldview, in which matter and Spirit are understood to have never been separate. Matter and Spirit reveal and manifest each other. This view relies more on awakening than joining, more onseeing than obeying, more on growth in consciousness and love than on clergy, experts, morality, scriptures, or prescribed rituals.

In Christian history, we see an incarnational worldview most strongly in the early Eastern Fathers, Celtic spirituality, many mystics who combined prayer with intense social involvement, Franciscanism in general, many nature mystics, and contemporary eco-spirituality. Overall, a materialistic worldviewis held in the technocratic world and areas its adherents colonize; a spiritual worldview is held by the whole spectrum of heady and esoteric people; and a priestly worldview is found in almost all of organized religion.

An incarnational worldview grounds Christian holiness in objective and ontological reality instead of just moral behavior. This is its big benefit. Yet, this is the important leap that so many people have not yet made. Those who have can feel as holy in a hospital bed or a tavern as in a chapel. They can see Christ in the disfigured and broken as much as in the so-called perfect or attractive. They can love and forgive themselves and all imperfect things, because all carry the Imago Dei equally, even if not perfectly. Incarnational Christ Consciousness will normally move toward direct social, practical, and immediate implications. It is never an abstraction or a theory. It is not a mere pleasing ideology. If it is truly incarnational Christianity, then it is always “hands-on” religion and not solely esotericism, belief systems, or priestly mediation.

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from a sermon on Advent that showed up in my email…..

Advent – this Advent at least – begins in lament. Not sentimentalism. Not nostalgia. But also not despair. So if you are entering this season in which you normally find great solace feeling instead bewildered – you’re entering it in exactly the right way. This may not seem comforting, but it’s here that we learn real hope. Hope draws on the stories of God’s faithfulness in the past not in order to replicate the past but in order to remind us that God is trustworthy. God is no idol with the appearance of giving us what we want when and how we want it (while actually robbing us blind), God is living and active, moving over here and over there while remaining faithfully everywhere. The hope of Advent is not ‘I found God where I always find God.’ The hope is, rather, awaiting the coming of the God who appears in ways, and places, and faces we never thought to look. And this appearing may take time – but stay awake, because God comes when we least expect God to come. The stories of faith are indeed our stories, but not in the way we think. They are ours not for replication, but for reminder, and the reminder for hope. And what they remind us of is that though God hides, God never abandons. So don’t hold your back your tears, or even your screams. As Patricia E. De Jong writes,

“As a friend has said, this is not a season for passive waiting and watching. It is a season of wailing and weeping, of opening up our lives and our souls with active anticipation and renewed hope.”^⁠5

Especially this Advent. And the weeping and wailing are not the opposite of hope, friends, they are the gateway to it.

Shortly after giving birth herself, author Kat Armas had new insights into the nativity through the experience of Mary: 

I’ve often said that the Bible is a book written by men, for men. Throughout the centuries most of its interpreters and preachers have been men as well. It’s no surprise then, that the story of the incarnation—and its rendering and interpretations thereafter—would glide over the messy realities of pregnancy and labor. Indeed, we’re told about the politics requiring Joseph to register in his hometown, about the shepherds keeping watch, and about heavenly hosts of angels celebrating, but we hear nothing of the blood, the nakedness, the primal groans, the fear, the strength and power of the human body, the first-time shrieks of new life bursting into the world….

Perhaps this is where we received our first antiseptic views of holiness, from a sterilized story of incarnation far removed from its reality. We’ve come to understand the concept of holiness as uncontaminated from the realities of the world, but is this truly the story of divinity? The story of God entering into our grief, our sorrows, our joys?

Like so many renderings of the narratives in Scripture, the birth of Jesus has been domesticated and dulled to make it more palatable. But there’s something subversively fleshly and carnal about Mary birthing God and her role as an active agent in the messy, material, and imminent.

I wonder, What was it like for Mary to birth God? What was it like to feel God squirm and settle as he pressed against her organs? She probably got short of breath and had trouble finding a comfortable position for sleep at night….

Armos reminds us of the real and raw birth process that Mary experienced:

This matters because a broken, refugee, brown, female, naked, stretched, hormonal, marginalized body is how divinity entered this world and where divinity still makes itself most known today….

The nativity scene, like much of Western theology, is far removed from the very bloody and very raw and very human process of birth. But these are the kinds of things that make up our faith: the naked, the primal, even the offensive. And while Mary’s story turned out the way she’d hope it would—with a newborn child in her arms—not all stories turn out that way. What the nativity scene as we’re used to seeing it fails to show us is that our faith is made of that too: the sadness, the questions, the longing, the despair, the anger. Encompassed within the birth of Jesus is the deeply difficult and deeply beautiful, the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the material. Like our lives, it was fleshly and carnal—and it was also holy.

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“The Word became flesh and made his tent/Tabernacle among us.“

– The Gospel of John 1:14

This past week I was invited to give a Zoom Christmas lesson to a young adults group.  It was a lot of fun.  I decided to just “go full word nerd” on them and read through the first 14 verses of John’s Gospel and point out some unique things that happen in the original Greek text…

One of the things that stood out to me came as a result of reading John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology by Father John Behr.  In that book, Behr makes the compelling case that John’s Gospel highlights Jesus as not only being God in the flesh but also the Temple itself in the flesh.

In all fairness, I had never heard that angle before and after having reread the Gospel of John recently, I am convinced that Behr was correct.  At each turn in John’s Gospel, Jesus, in his own way, critiques, overturns and replaces the Temple with his own self.

In light of Christmas, this is utterly profound to me.

The Incarnation is not only of God made flesh but also the Temple made flesh.  I am not even sure if I am able to write more about this mystery right now, I am still settling into its depths for myself!

Celebrating Incarnation

Richard Rohr describes why Christmas and celebrating the Incarnation of Jesus is foundational to Franciscan spirituality:

In the first 1200 years of Christianity, the central feast or celebration was Easter, with the high holy days of Holy Week leading up to the celebration of the resurrection of Christ. But in the thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi entered the scene. He intuited that we didn’t need to wait for God to love us through the cross and resurrection. Francis believed the whole thing started with incarnate love. He popularized what we now take for granted as Christmas, which for many became the major Christian feast. Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation when we celebrate God taking human form in the birth of Jesus.

Francis realized that since God had become flesh—taken on materiality, physicality, humanity—then we didn’t have to wait for Good Friday and Easter to “solve the problem” of human sin: the problem was solved from the beginning. It makes sense that Christmas became the great celebratory feast of Christians because it basically says that it’s good to be human, it’s good to be on this Earth, it’s good to have a body, it’s good to have emotions. We don’t need to be ashamed of any of it! God loves matter and physicality.

With that insight, it’s no wonder Francis went wild over Christmas. (I do too—my little house is filled with candles at Christmastime.) Francis believed that trees should be decorated with lights to show their true status as God’s creations, and that’s exactly what we still do eight hundred years later.

And there’s more: when we speak of Advent or preparing for Christmas, we’re not just talking about waiting for the little baby Jesus to be born. That already happened two thousand years ago. In fact, we’re welcoming the Universal Christ, the Cosmic Christ, the Christ that is forever being born (incarnating) in the human soul and into history.

We do have to make room for such a mystery, because right now there is “no room in the inn.” We see things pretty much in their materiality, but we don’t see the light shining through. We don’t see the incarnate spirit that is hidden inside of everything material.

The early Eastern Church, which too few people in the United States and Western Europe are familiar with, made it very clear that the Incarnation of Christ manifests a universal principle. Incarnation meant not just that God became Jesus, but that God said yes to the material universe and physicality itself. Eastern Christianity understands the mystery of incarnation in the universal sense. So it is always Advent because God is forever coming into the world (see John 1:9).

We’re always waiting to see Spirit revealing itself through matter. We’re always waiting for matter to become a new form in which Spirit is revealed. Whenever that happens, we’re celebrating Christmas. The gifts of incarnation just keep coming! Perhaps this is enlightenment.

Saying Yes to Body and Spirit

Father Richard describes the incarnational faith of Mary:

In the Gospels, the Book of Acts, and throughout the epistles, a whole new dimension of faith becomes available to those who accept it. It is a way of living in the Spirit, which some of the Hebrew prophets anticipate. The prophet Joel speaks of this most clearly:

In the days that follow, I will pour out my spirit on everyone. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy. Your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions. In those days I will pour out my spirit even on your servants and your handmaids (Joel 3:1–2).

We see the Spirit descending upon Jesus after his baptism in the Jordan, and we see the Spirit again filling the apostles with power on the day of Pentecost. But the very first person who incarnates this new faith was Mary of Nazareth, who said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me” (Luke 1:38). It was Mary who responded with an unconditional yes to the angel’s announcement that she was to give birth to the Messiah.

Mary is the model of the faith to which God calls all of us: a total and unreserved yes to God’s request to be present in and to the world through us. God desires to love others unconditionally in and through us. Those who live with such a faith can truly be called God’s instruments. God wants Light to shine through us, and so our first response to this call is simply to heed it and remain open to divine grace. Mary said her yes to God, and God was able to become incarnate in her. She gave birth to Christ by being so totally open to God’s Spirit that the Christ child could be born. [1]

The question then becomes for us: How do we also give birth, as Mary did?

There is no mention of any moral worthiness, achievement, or preparedness in Mary, only humble trust and surrender. She gives us all, therefore, a bottomless hope in our own little place. If we ourselves try to “manage” God or manufacture our own worthiness by any perfection or performance principle whatsoever, we will never give birth to the Christ, but only more of ourselves. [2]

Whenever the material and the spiritual coincide, there is the Christ. Jesus fully accepted that human-divine identity and walked it into history. Henceforth, the Christ “comes again” whenever we are able to see the spiritual and the material coexisting, in any moment, in any event, and in any person. All matter reveals Spirit, and Spirit needs matter to “show itself”! What I like to call the “Forever Coming of Christ” happens whenever and wherever we allow this to be utterly true for us. This is how God continually breaks into history. [3]

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“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding about ourselves.“

– Carl Jung, Swiss Psychologist and Philosopher

Everything is our teacher.  Not just our friends and our successes, but our annoyances and our failures.  Perhaps it is because I am approaching 40 in December, but I have been internally shifting to the things that Jung calls the “second half of life.”  The first half is all about building our ego and sense of self, the second half is all about letting it go and learning from our failures.

It is not easy, but it is good work to get around to doing.  Keep growing.  Everything is your teacher.

God will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness.… “Now I am making the whole of creation new…. It is already done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.” 
—Revelation 21:4–6, Jerusalem Bible

Father Richard finds a hopeful vision for universal restoration in the Scriptures:

It’s quite shocking to contrast these verses from Revelation with Christianity’s more recent notions of Armageddon or the Rapture. Instead of judgment and destruction, we witness God keeping creation both good and new—which means always going somewhere even better or, in a word, evolving. God keeps creating things from the inside out, so they are forever yearning, growing, and changing. Implanted in all living things, this generative force grows them both from within—because they are programmed for it—and from without—as they take in light, nutrition, and water.

If we see the Eternal Christ Mystery as the symbolic Alpha Point for the beginning of “time,” we can see that history and evolution truly have an intelligent plan and trajectory from the very start. The Risen Christ assures us that, all crucifixions to the contrary, God is leading us somewhere positive. God has been leading us since the beginning and even includes us in the process of unfolding (Romans 8:28–30). Christ is the Divine Radiance at the beginning and the Divine Allure drawing us into a more positive future. We are thus bookended in a Personal Love—coming from Love and moving toward an ever more inclusive Love. The Book of Revelation brilliantly names this “Alpha” and “Omega” (the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet).

Many do not feel a need for creation to have any form, direction, or purpose. After all, many scientists do not seem to ask such ultimate questions. Evolutionists observe the evidence and the data and say the universe is clearly unfolding and still expanding at ever faster rates, although they do not know the final goal of this expansion. But Christians should believe that the overarching vision does have a shape and meaning—which is revealed from its inception as “good, good, good, good, good” and even “very good” (Genesis 1:10–31). The biblical symbol of the Universal and Eternal Christ, standing at both ends of cosmic time, was intended to assure us that the clear and full trajectory of the world we know is an unfolding of consciousness with “all creation groaning in this one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22). [1]

Authentic mystical experience connects us and keeps connecting us at ever-newer levels, breadths, and depths “until God is all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). “The world, life and death, the present and the future all belong to you, for you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God” (1 Corinthians 3:22–23). Full salvation is finally universal belonging and universal connecting. Our word for that is “heaven.” [2]

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December 31, 2010

Journal Entry for Today-JDV

The last day of the year and is it me or is God really organizing my thoughts and vision of a fresh look at life in the New Year? Is He sorting things so that I see and feel His hand on my past and on my future?

And God says…”Your culture and the pervasive communications around the New Year event have prepared your mind for the fertile seeds of hope for tomorrow. It is right inside this cultural field of hope that the Holy Spirit can operate inside your heart and mind and that of many, many others. Be aware that many are looking for the very hope that lives within you and shines on your face. Be sensitive and available to share your hope. The hope you have found in Christ Jesus.”

Becoming Agents of Change

Arab-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye recalls a transformative, unexpected occasion of generous acceptance:

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal … I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.”

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. “Help,” said the flight service person. “Talk to her.… We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly. “Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment.… I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.”

We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother … and would ride next to her.… She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought … why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free beverages … and two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

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“The best way to stay hopeful is to do hopeful things.“

– Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit Priest, Poet, and Activist

This past week I revisited a book called Daniel Berrigan: Essential Writings.  It is marvelous.  I have not finished it yet, but his poetry and prose have claimed my imagination.  Over the years, I have come into contact with people who knew him personally and said that he was the real deal.  He fought against the Vietnam War, mopped hospital floors on his days off, protested, prayed, wrote poetry, and so much more.

In many ways, he was one of the best examples of what a Christian could look like in the modern age.

He was also known for saying, “If you follow Jesus, you better look good on wood!”  By this, he was referencing that if you follow Jesus, you better expect to be crucified for it.  Dan seemed willing to take his joke seriously.

Mending the World

CAC teacher Mirabai Starr writes of Judaism’s affirmation of tikkun olam—human participation in the world’s restoration: 

There is a kabbalistic story in which the boundless, formless, unified Holy One wished to know its Holy Self, and so it contracted and poured itself into vessels. But the Divine Radiance was too much for these limited containers, and so they shattered, scattering shards of broken light across the universe, giving birth to all that is.

This sounds like modern cosmology, which also asserts that the universe expanded from an exceedingly high-density state, resulting in the full spectrum of material phenomena. I’ve dubbed this vessel-shattering version of the origins of the universe “the Jewish big bang.” It comes from a teaching Rabbi Isaac Luria offered in the sixteenth century to illustrate how form arises from formlessness, how light gets trapped inside darkness, and how the Holy One needs us to participate in the unfolding goodness of creation. Humans, as the teaching goes, were created to excavate and lift the shards of light from the dense predicament of existence and restore the vessels to wholeness.

In mystical Judaism, this teaching is known as tikkun olam, the mending of the world. How are we to do this? The answer is: with every act of chesed (loving-kindness) and tzedakah (generosity). It means observing the directives found in the Torah…. It means cultivating a contemplative practice to nurture intimacy with the Divine, making an effort to welcome the stranger and care for the Earth. It means bending close to listen for what it is our sisters and brothers on the margins might need (and being willing to forgo our notions of what “helping” looks like, since our preconceived ideas of service sometimes get in the way of authentically serving). It means pressing our ear to the land to hear the heartbeat of the Mother, learning to read her pulses, diagnose her ailments, intuit healing remedies. It means slowing down enough to let the pain of the world all the way into our hearts, allowing our hearts to break open, and acting from that broken-open space. It means stepping up with humility, with curiosity, with love. [1]

Starr encouraged students at the CAC’s Living School: 

Our task is to mend the broken world. This is our job: to mend this shattered vessel, to repair the brokenness of the world. How do we do this? You might ask yourself this every single day, if you’re anything like me. We do this through every act of loving kindness, every act of chesed. And we do this through every act of tzedakah, which is, for lack of a better translation, generosity, hospitality. It’s sometimes translated as charity; it’s an offering of ourselves, even when it’s not convenient and not comfortable. The nice thing about Judaism, and this is true in Islam as well, is that our loving, kind thoughts count too. The actions [count], certainly, of course, but our loving thoughts make a difference. They help mend the world. [2]

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“We do injury to children if we bring them up in a narrow Christianity that prevents them from ever becoming capable of perceiving the treasures of purest gold found in non-Christian civilizations.“

– Simone Weil, French Philosopher

Only an insecure faith is incapable of seeing the good beyond its own borders or boundaries.  A faith that is grounded and charitable is able to notice the beauty of another way of life.

For Simone to connect this sentiment with the formation of young children, drives home the point even more.  Tribalistic approaches to Christianity that exclude and demonize the Other are the antithesis of being Christlike charity and hospitality.

Joan Chittister, Murshid Saadi Shakur Chishti, and Rabbi Arthur Waskow, writing from their traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, believe we all share equally in God’s image, even amid our joint history of violence. 

All our traditions—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—teach that the human race and every human being are created in the image of God. Rabbinic midrash says that when Caesar puts his image on a coin, each coin comes out identical—but that when the One who is beyond all rulers puts the divine image on the coin of every human being, each “coin” comes out unique.…

Today, the various Caesars of our planet insist that we must fit into a single mold, the mold of uniformity and death.… The pain of these deaths and of this destruction drives some of the children of Hagar, through Ishmael, and some of the children of Sarah, through Isaac, to forget that they are all children of Abraham. That we are all children of Noah and his wife, Naamah, who suffered through the danger that human violence imposes on all who dwell on our planet.…

If we are to celebrate [the Infinite God], we must in the same breath resist the idolatrous Caesars who think to impose upon us their murders. In our banks, our kindergartens, our picket lines and voting booths, as we worship in our graceful sacred buildings and in our quiet forests and on our frenzied streets, through the seasons of our joy and of our sorrow—in all these, we must remember to welcome ourselves, each other, and all who begin as strangers into the Tent that is open to all. [1]

Richard Rohr describes how each person is created in the Divine image, and is called to participate in the process of growing into God’s likeness: 

What does it mean that everything created—everything our eyes can see or have ever seen—is somehow a partial reflection of the image of God? How can something be diverse as all of creation, and at the same time say that reality is more one than many? We say it of God, and we say it of everything our eyes have ever seen.

If we don’t view everything as created in the image of God, what happens? We start picking and choosing: well, that’s created in the image of God, but that is not. But everything, everything, is created in the image of God.

What, then, does likeness mean? In the early centuries of Christianity, the Church Fathers concluded: image was our objective, unquestionable creation as a child or image of God. Likeness was our personal appropriation of that reality. Two people might equally be images of God, but perhaps only one chooses to become kind, forgiving, inclusive, accepting, and patient, full of the great virtues. We already have image, but we grow in likeness. There is a dynamism toward growth, universality, and an infinite love that we can’t get rid of. [2]

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“What is difficult or impossible in one paradigm is easy, even trivial, in another.“

– Joel Barker, Author and Futurist

Over the years, I have come to appreciate the various developmental theories that study how we change and grow throughout our lifetimes.  More than a few focus on our worldviews/value systems and reaffirm this comment from Barker…

Sometimes what we need is not so much a quick fix, but an upgrade on the way that we see the world around us.  Upgrade the way we see things, and the solution may have been blatantly in front of us the whole time.

Imagine you have a screw that needs tightening, but you have no screwdriver.  Perhaps your worldview demands that you find the right screwdriver.  However, if you upgrade and are willing to use something other than a screwdriver, perhaps you can use the dime in your pocket or the knife in your drawer to tighten it.  Turns out, you didn’t need to have a screwdriver to tighten the screw!